I was sitting here with my architect buddy and we couldn't figure out what the point of it so close to the wall was.

Looks like there is a center beam effectively cutting the joist spans in half. That beam can't span front to back on just one column, so it required 2 columns. I'm guessing instead of spacing the 2 columns out equally someone decided to just have one in the car area and push the other into a more out of the way area. Perhaps they thought it would make it easier to get in and out of cars with just one column instead of two in the car area? I can think of a couple different ways to do that, but they would all be at an increased cost.